The emotional plague is defined as destructive human behavior on the social scene. Often, I come across someone who asks why is it necessary to use the term emotional plague when we see destructive human behavior. Since the plague is manifested everywhere, why can’t we just call it human destructiveness and leave it at that? The answer that I give is that unlike the behavior of ordinary neurotic individuals,the emotional plague individual cannot tolerate the expression of life in others. Because of this intolerance, his behavior is aimed at destroying in some way the lives of others. The element of infectiousness squarely places the emotional plague in the field of medicine as a legitimate communicable disease. Therefore, the plague must be understood and treated medically as any other infectious disease.
As an analogy, imagine speaking to someone from the fifteenth century, a time when one-third of the European population was wiped out by the bubonic plague and telling them that the disease is caused by an invisible organism that lives on a flea that lives on a rat and that the only way to eradicate the disease is to practice sanitary hygienic measures. The person would have no understanding of what was being said. This is the same situation that exists today when, because the emotional plague is not recognized, any mention of it as a grave danger to human life is met with incomprehension and disbelief. People today are living in the same state of ignorance and are jeopardized about their vital emotional functions, healthy as well as pathological which includes the emotional plague, as that which existed in the eighteenth century when medical pathology had not yet discovered the sources of infectious diseases.
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Right on and well said, Dr. Konia! Reading your posts are a vitalizing breath of fresh air, to me! thank you! MGBrennan